'Now Is the Time' featured actors Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis doing in-studio readings from the passionate writings of American Negroes as cameras caught on-location illustrative and impressionistic films of Philadelphia Negroes. A unique anthology of American Negro attitudes from the earliest days of subservience to current times of heightened self-respect."
Includes footage of a church service, elderly women, children playing, decayed apartment buildings, protest marches and rallies, lunch counter sit-ins, and violent encounters between protesters and police.
Includes readings from from the writings of: Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Lucy Smith, Claude Brown, Countee Cullen, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Naomi L. Madgett, Waring Cuney, Herbert Clark Johnson, Malcolm X, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Rita Vaughan, Mari E. Evans, Sterling A. Brown, Floyd McKissick, Stokely Carmichael, Ernie Chambers, Dr. Nathan Wright and Rev. M.L. Wilson. Also includes comments from African-American children about race, and excerpts from gospel songs and spirituals.

With: Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee.

Chronicles in music and the words of Negro poets and leaders the history of the American Negro, showing the reasons for his impatience and anger at equivocation and evasion concerning equal rights and respect for his race. Actors Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee narrate the presentation which includes poignant poetry by Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen and the impassioned statements of James Baldwin, Malcolm X, and Stokely Carmichael.

"“Now is the time.” This phrase embodies the impatience that simmered within the black community during the late 1960s. Due to the slow progression towards racial equality and the subsequent emergence of Black Nationalism, many African Americans began to focus less on racial integration and more on racial solidarity as a means of achieving social justice. Hence, various media sources attempted to portray this new mood within the African American community by associating negative images and language with the Black Power Movement. The 1967 documentary Now is the Time, however, takes a different approach to Black Nationalism. Using microfilm copies of twentieth-century newspapers such as the Philadelphia Inquirer and the New York Times, multiple anthologies of African American literature, and scholarly books about Black Nationalism, I have found that Now is the Time uses selected works of canonized African American writers to legitimize the Black Power Movement. Although the film fails to include the voices of early African American writers, most likely due to the paucity of available sources, the words of writers such as Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), James Baldwin (1924- 1987), and Langston Hughes (1902-1967) show that resistance and anger have characterized the African American experience since the earliest days of slavery.
Examining Now is the Time’s normalization of Black Power addresses the conflicting portrayals of this movement in the late twentieth century and simultaneously probes questions about the way in which media sources portray Black Power in the post-Civil Rights Movement era."

JoyEllen Freeman, Portrayal of Power: Black Nationalism in the Documentary Now Is the Time, Master's Thesis, University of Georgia, 2011.

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